The Multifunctioning DBA

This is, as the title suggests, my final post here at this site. I have been here for a few years and it has been great. But I feel that it is time to start my own blog site and try to build a bit of a brand all my own. So my new blog is DBYAY.com. This will be a site about SQL Server, Powershell, and my general IT life. I want to thank ITKE for all they have done for me by giving me a place to call home for so long. This is a great site and community and I will still be here trolling the questions and hopefully providing as well as getting some answers. So thanks to all who have been reading my blog and I hope that you will continue to at my new home.

I would really like some more people to let me know what I should present on. Please let me know what you would like to hear me talk about if you could come to the event, or if you are coming to the event. I think all the sessions could be fun but I am not sure if it is worth doing all four. They are a lot of work to set up and prepare. I will do all if I get some responce showing that you all would like to hear about all of it but if not I am only going to do two of them. So please let me know what you would like to see and I will do that.

Recently I needed to find out what was in all of my memory slots but I am too lazy to shut down my computer and open it up and actually look at what is installed. I found a tool called the Belarc Advisor that will analyze your machine and tell you just what you need to know. And it is free. Check it out here.

I ran into a version issue the other day. I have a script that uses import-csv with the -delimiter parameter that was introduced with PowerShell version 2.0. I attempted to run the script on a machine that was running Powershell version 1. This is an issue because the -delimiter parameter does not exist. This is an issue because the file I was reading in was not delimited by comma. So be careful and you might want to put a version check block in your scripts. Something like this.

$host.version.major -gt 1

If that is true then I would have been good to go. If that returns false, then I would be able to output an error that would have made troubleshooting the issue much easier and faster.

If you read this Blog I consider you a friend. Since you are my friend I will offer you a 15% discount at PetSmart. This is good December 6 – 9 so please go get your pets something nice, or get a new pet.

I really never play any lottery, but with the pot being 550 million this time around I threw some money in with some friends at work to see what happens. All I know is that it has been fun to dream about what we all might do with the money. We all say that we would come into work but I am not so sure that everyone would. If we were to win, I think I would want to do a couple of things.

1. I would not want to let any one know that I was a winner. I would set up a trust and have the money go into the trust. I do not want everyone coming to me for hand outs.

2. I would gift some money to all my family, that I am close too, in order to help them all out.

3. I would start a consulting company and offer all of my good technical friends very good paying jobs and give them all the best opportunity that I could.

4. I would also want to start a sports bar or something. Might be fun to have some sort of geek theme, but I doubt I would get a lot of business with that.

But that is all a pipe dream. But still fun to think about and talk about. So if you played the Powerball tonight, Good luck and if you win, have a good time with the money.

So I have successfully installed Delphix into a VM using Virtual Box. I had to bump the memory of the VM up to 4 gigs to get it to install. So now I have three machines. Two Server 2012, one is a DC and a SQL Server, and one is running core edition and SQL Server. I should be all set but now I seem to be having another issue. I can ping my Delphix server from both of my Windows servers but I am unable to get to the management URL for the Delphix server. Not really sure what is going on with that since it shows all services are running and I can ping the box as well as telnet to the Delphix server on port 8080. So I will have more on this as I work it out. I will have to get this figured out if I am going to do a SQL Saturday session on Delphix.

After posting about what I am thinking about for SQL Saturday 193 sessions, I decided a survey would be a good way to hear what you think. So, if you are going to attend or not, let me know what you would like me to present on as I will be posting slides and any code for you to download.

That is right, SQL Saturday is coming back for the third year to Phoenix. I am again excited for the event and I am sure that I will do my Beginner Powershell for the session and I am thinking about doing a couple others. I might do a next level Powershell for the DBA so that I can dive a bit deeper into what Powershell really gains the DBA. This session will probably be mostly demo and not so much what and why Powershell. That you should get from the beginning Powershell session. One big dilemma I have this time around is that Powershell Plus is now free. That is awesome and I am glad that everyone can use it now, but it is not as exciting to give away something that is already free. I will have to talk to some vendors and see what I can get for you.

The other session that I am thinking of will be on Delphix for SQL Server. A co-worker has expressed interest in presenting on this with me as we have both been very involved with the beta testing of the product and have had the opportunity to provide feedback on the product and help shape what the final product will look like. I think that by the time the event comes around, they will have a fully baked product and I think you will all love it.

So three sessions is a lot of work to put it all together and update the one that I already have. I will figure it out and get it done though. Those are the three that I would really like to do so let me know if you would rather one or the other or if none or all three. Or please suggest something else that you think I might be good at presenting. I am always looking for feedback and new ideas. That just made me think of a fourth, SQL Server on Windows Server Core. I have it up and running on a VM now and it is pretty cool. So that is four but I am not sure I can pull that many off and do them all as good as I would want to. So please let me know what you think I should present on.

Here is a link to the event. Looks like we already have some good sessions submitted. So please come out and present or just come out and do some networking and learning. I know I always meet some good people and I always learn something new. These events really are fantastic, and they are free. Check it out.

So I have completed the build of two of my three VM Servers in VirtualBox. I have my domain set up and I even have SQL Server 2012 running on both my GUI edition and my Core edition. More to come on set up issues in another post. I am attempting to get my Delphix image installed and I am running into some issues. I think it is a memory issue on my laptop. I am pushing that poor thing too far. So I am upgrading, my memory that is. My laptop is a good little i3 but only has 4 gigs of ram. I am doubling the memory in hopes that will help with my issues. I think that is the core of my issue, but I could be wrong. It could be that I am running in Virtual Box and I do not think Delphix supports that. I think the only OS level Virtualization they support is ESX. I do not think I am going to put ESX on my laptop, but I will need to figure something out to get this up and running. So more to come on this as I should get my upgrade in the mail today and I will install it as soon as I have it in my hands. Running a host OS plus 3 VM’s on only 4 gigs of memory is not a good thing.

About This Blog

This blog is written by an IT professional with over 5 years experience in Windows Server Administration. New to the DBA world, Colin Smith is now involved with Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and Sybase databases. This blog covers database administration, Windows administration, Scripting and more.